The
Weak Empire
I think we can all agree that something has gone wrong
recently. Something in the air isn't quite right. Locally, everything
seems the same. I go out of my house in the mornings, sprint around the
corner and miss my bus just as often as before. When I get into town,
the people walking around at lunch time are mostly self-controlled and
rational looking people. The kind of people you'd trust to take a picture
of you with your own camera. They certainly don't look like they're only
a few psychological knocks away from outright insanity.
But then that's what we thought about the US until recently. Hooray, we
said when Nice Bill Clinton came to visit us here in Ireland and surreally
stood in College Green, like an unlikely photomontage come to life. Ooh,
we gasped as the laws of economics were suspended for the IT boom and
people we went to college with suddenly became richer than the rest of
their town put together by working as a clerk in the right dotcom. Cool,
we said when we watched the aliens blowing up the Empire State Building
in Independence Day, and then being driven back by good old fashioned
American Know-How.
But when real aliens flattened the World Trade Centre something fell out
of the giant machine. It's as though a spring shot past our ears. The
entire thing looks just as impressive as before. We just can't quite place
where this little piece came from. But since then, I think we're all agreed
that there's a little clunking noise which wasn't there before. That we've
had some funny end products rolling off the conveyer belt. That, as I
say, something has gone wrong.
JG Ballard said recently that the unconscious always comes out. Of its
nature, the unconscious isn't really the kind of thing you want to look
at in the light of day, even at the best of times. But the unconscious
of an empire on the rise is a uniquely disturbing thing. Conquest and
occupation are bad for any culture, regardless which role it has taken.
As Ireland and Britain knows better than most, the deeper both sides go,
the tighter they are pulled together whether they want to or not. Ireland
has been an independent state for nearly 80 years now. But at the fair
to mark the new countries joining the EU in April, the British stand had
on display, apropos of nothing really, a poster of a cartoon English Gent
and Irish businessman, bound face to face with one belt around their waist. "UK and Ireland", it said, "We have more in common than we think."
Wow. How's that for the unconscious coming out?
But, though it's fashionable to compare the US to the British Empire,
there are better parallels from history. Where Britain extended its empire
through constant conquest over hundreds of years, the US has launched
its own in reaction to a single event.
I've tried elsewhere to give a sense of the impact on Rome of their wars
with Carthage. Even after there was no threat left, they worried away
at the effect to their self-image, as unstoppable military titans, that
Hannibal's long Punic campaigns had on them. They'd won, but it had taken
their generals years to realize that they could only do so by adopting
the strategies of the weak- hit and run, melt away from the other side.
The worries became a psychosis.
The Romans despised weakness. At the heart of their civilization, the
gladiatorial games, and the accompanying pitting of helpless conquered
people against wild animals were the unconscious given full sadistic form.
A military democracy, built on the honour of conquest had saved itself
by succumbing to its worst, hidden fear. They were forced to admit the
limits of their power. Decades later, that fact remained so disquieting
that to try to redeem themselves, they eventually attacked a quiet Carthage,
slaughtering everyone and sowing their soil with salt so nothing could
ever grow there again. That was a burst from the unconscious, pure in
its irrationality and in its power.
Tsk. Rome. It always seems to pull me off track. But here, I think we
haven't gone too far. Let's stop beating around the bush about this, shall
we? America seems to have entered a period of irrationality. They've listened
to Talking Heads and together have decided to Stop Making Sense. Bluntly,
I think they've gone collectively mad.
I don't think, although I did for a while, that it was just that I was
able to see for myself things that had always been there, but happened
well away from my radar. After all, the internet means that conversations
that could only be heard in low wattage fraternity houses can now appear
in front of my eyes with the click of a mouse. US television news, well,
it only became available to us here recently, so who knows? It was probably
always so skewed, so... well, wrong. Wrong in tone, in its view
of the world as them and us, wrong in its willful blindness to the broader
picture.
Probably nothing new here, I said to myself. Just new to you. But, oh
dear, if so why are things getting worse before my eyes? Why are people
in power allowed to assert day is night to my face now, without being
just confronted by the facts we all see that contradict them. Up until
recently, I was clinging onto the hope of a quick fix. Ah well, no real
harm done, I told myself. Nothing that a quick Bushendectamy couldn't
put right.
But no, I'm afraid I can't hold on to that any more. Of course, removal
of the malignancy is a vital part of the cure, but we've gone past that
now. Everything has been tainted. People are walking around in the middle
of nowhere, in Main st. USA, and their hearts are sick from hating. But
distressingly for them, they can't see who they're hating. Everyone else
seems all right. Where are the monsters?
***
Monsters are the province of the unconscious, of course.
And there is no quicker line to a culture's unconscious than through the
stories it tells itself. One of the things that made me realize how deeply
the wounds of the past few years have cut is the disappearance of the
Evil Genius as a movie staple Faced with the most personalized assaults
on their way of life, with their antagonists so familiar as to be referred
to with their first name, Hollywood and its audience have shied away from
trying to explore what that might mean. In their place, we're faced with
impersonal, unstoppable forces of nature, or meaningless swarms of baddies-
tidal waves, asteroids, orc armies, zombies, ice storms and all the hoards
of Hell and the Met Office to menace civilisation.
But in fact it takes an Evil Genius to really threaten a civilization.
He needs to understand what makes it tick, better than it does itself.
He needs to play on its unconscious- the darkness it won't even acknowledge-
and ensnare it in its own nightmares.
Ireland fought with its own evil genius in the shape of Sinn Fein and
the Provisional IRA. They played on our secret sickness, our need to prove
we were better than the Brits, that they'd only managed to have the upper
hand for 800 years through a sequence of bad luck, treachery and freak
weather conditions. As the IRA started to blow up mothers and children,
as well as fathers and anyone else that moved, a serious bloc in the mainstream
of society here cheered them on. That'll teach them, we said. We're just
as good as them. Or we're just as bad. I can't remember which, now.
But, Our Day Will Come!, went the slogan! Then we'll be strong
and they'll be weak. Lilies, a symbol reaching back into a well of death,
a self-described blood sacrifice of other people's children, sprouted
on people's lapels. As the 1970s crawled in, the Irish psyche teetered
on the brink of being dragged back to the universal mud and blood of the
First World War.
That was the real threat to our civilization, and we escaped. At the price
of walking away from what we thought we believed in, a united Ireland,
we kept what we had, a civilized one. But it was, and still is, a close
run thing.
Mr. Bin Laden may not be an Evil Genius. Hopefully, he didn't know how
devastatingly effective his plans would be in destabilizing a hugely powerful
nation. I hope that he didn't read about the bouts of hysteria and irrationality
that seem to be sewn right into the collective consciousness of the US
and decide to provoke one. From the Puritan witch hunts, through the repressed
terror of the unpredictable savagery of the Indian in the wilderness of
the 1800's imagination, into the paranoia about Communists lurking in
every nook and cranny during the cold war the American psyche has been
periodically tormented by invisible, all powerful enemies. They're all
around us, they whisper to each other. They could get us at any time.
I really hope he didn't know what he was doing.
***
Empires are all about power- about strength and weakness.
They are a sado-masochistic relationship, where each side loves and hates
the other. Occupy somewhere, and you'll find your culture distorts in
reaction to theirs. Occupy Ireland or Iraq or India, and you'll project
all the things you aren't onto them, to reassure yourself that these people
aren't like you- that their weakness is due to their personal failings
and character flaws. You're hardworking and they're lazy. You're serious,
and they're fun loving. You're manly and rational, and they are at the
whim of their emotions. Crucially, you are strong and they are weak, and
that's the only way it could have been.
Nazism was the most extreme and codified example of the black attraction
of this kind of thinking. It was built on the sense of weakness the defeat
of Germany in WW1 created. Like the Roman violence after Hannibal, the
extremity of its insistence on power, strength, of natural leaders and
chosen races was a mirror image of the depth of the shock to the German
mind at changing from an Imperial power, to an occupied one. It is no
coincidence that it dressed itself in fetishistic leathers, boots and
uniforms. The entire Nazi state was a sadist, meting out pain to cover
its own feelings of inadequacies for everything from the weak Weimar Republic
to Hitler's single testicle. And it somehow, perhaps unconsciously, understood
that obsessing over the invisible infinite power of people who seem to
be helpless would be a prison. So like the Romans with Carthage they decided
the only thing to do was to wipe them out altogether and sow the rich
soil of Judaism with salt.
They were too mad to see that by taking that kind of action, they doomed
their nation to a new and deeper circle of hell.
It's a two way street, you know. As the British Council helpfully reminded
me at the EU fair, we're both in this thing together. Be occupied and
you'll tell yourself that it isn't your fault. That you couldn't have
won in the face of such overpowering force. You'll reject the words of
the occupier and all their deeds, while absorbing the spirit of their
society and their image of you. The stage Irishman was a joint creation
of the Irish and the English, each taking what they needed from it. Faith
and begorra, we said when we met them. Good Day To You, Sor!
For the English, Paddy Irishman, who invented the waterproof teabag and
the underwater hairdryer, was a figure of reassuring fun. A harmless buffoon,
who means well but just doesn't have the brains to get it together. Inferior,
and childlike, he definitely needs us to look after him. We're doing the
right thing here.
For the Irish, Paddy Irishman was a cunning actor, giving the fool English
what they wanted to see, while watching for his chance to profit from
their naivety. They paid him and he tipped his cap but would curse them
as soon as they were out of hearing range. But he also absorbed his agreed
role- he despised the English for not having any fun, but envied them
their organizational ability.
Both societies lost from this game -the English by frowning on expressing
emotions, for fear of appearing too frivolous, and the Irish by avoiding
efficiency and responsibility, in case someone accused them of acting
English.
Torture is the most extreme form of this kind of power struggle. Send
poor, and poorly educated people who have no power at home, to a faraway
place where they're on top. Tell them that these people they see are the
invisible enemies made flesh at last. Tell them they're in charge of them,
and that any behaviour is justified by their enemy's misdeeds. Then just
wait for the pictures to come back.
So finally, we come to the pictures and what they tell us about the state
of that big American machine we once admired so much. Donald Rumsfeld
said he didn't realize that the torture he'd been told about was that
big a deal until he saw the photos of it. Given that concerns of mistreatment
had been raised publicly before by the Red Cross and other agencies and
they went nowhere, he obviously wasn't the only one.
They weren't smuggled out by an undercover reporter- they were emailed
out by the people who were conducting the abuse. Just as many of the pictures
taken in the Concentration camps were taken by Nazis documenting their
activities and we know only of the Carthaginians' fate because it was
proudly recorded by Roman historians.
If history is written by the victors, then this kind of unconscious self-condemnation
is revelatory. It shows a national spirit that has reduced the occupied
to non-people. They are just the monsters of our fears, and this is the
chance to prove to yourself that you're more powerful than them.
This kind of raw power, the see-saw of domination and humiliation only
works if other people see it, and both parties to it- the abuser and the
abused- know that is what will happen. These weren't rough soldiers, following
a private perverted impulse of their own. These people were playing out
the unconscious fantasies of every occupying power in history.
Prove you're stronger than them. Stifle the thought that it could be you
under the hood in different circumstances.
And instead listen to the voice at the back of your mind telling you to
hit them harder, for fear of what they will do to you if they ever get
a chance.
This is a prison. You can't get out, until you're willing to see the walls.
Switching faces on the Iraq TV news won't end this problem if the relationship
behind it is still based on the exercise of power. The US had a friendly
government they propped up in South Vietnam. But as they became the real
occupying power in that country and committed themselves more completely
to trying to maintain their control of the society they found their imaginations
tainted, unable to understand why the Vietnamese were willing to embrace
whatever leader seemed most likely to resist them. An entire generation
of films, books, political arguments and family stories testifies to the
power of that kind of effort to disturb a culture.
Outside the prison of empire, friends and relatives
of the captors and the captives can only wait, arguing over which is which.
by
Simon McGarr
1th July 2004
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